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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Role Playing: Give a Scholarship to Get a Scholarship

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What are you doing when you apply for a scholarship?

“I’m getting money,” you answer.

Wrong.

You’re inspiring someone else to give you money—to fund your
life and dreams.

One of the best ways to understand this is to do a bit of
role playing. Imagine, for a moment, you’re going to host a scholarship. Actually,
you’ve probably done something similar—have you ever hosted any sort of
contest? Judged a class? It’s not that different.

After a lot of discussion with your peers in your music
business, you’ve determined you want to help other students who, like when you
were in college, wanted to study music, were very talented, but didn’t have the
finances to do so.

If you're funding someone's college education, chances are, the top student has a better shot at your scholarship.

So you read every essay very carefully. You specifically
chose the prompt, “How has music changed your life?” so you could really see
the role music played in the applicants’ mental, emotional, and spiritual
lives. Some of the applicants clearly weren’t passionate, naming things like, “it
was a fun extracurricular,” or “I made money teaching piano.”

However, as you’re flipping through the essays on your
kitchen table at midnight, another essay stands out. Even though this girl’s
grades aren’t that great, she clearly loves music with all her heart. Not only
has she volunteered at the community center (“Wonderful,” you think, “she likes
music enough to not even get paid for it!”) but she is doing everything in her
power to be a music teacher in the inner city of Los Angeles. From the list of
jobs she’s had, you can see she’s trying hard, but ends just aren’t meeting.
Clearly she’s dedicated to her goal: she just needs a little financial help.

There you go. She’s the one.

You see how this works? Your application isn’t just going
out to a machine. It’s being read by people who care about you and your future.
And speaking to them—that’s how you fund college through scholarships.